Editorial: UCLA drought report evidence most of state just doesn't get it

This newspaper is often accused of favoring, or encouraging, or supporting something by putting it on the front page of our newspaper. Not true. Sometimes we put things out there just because they're so unbelievably stupid we think our readers need to have their jaws drop in disbelief once in a while.

So it was with the story in Friday's paper with a report from the UCLA Anderson School of Business Management that the drought wasn't going to have much of an impact on California's economy. The drought might keep unemployment 0.2 percent higher than it might have been, but hey, no big deal.

And in the realm of statistics (reference Mark Twain on that) the report is absolutely correct. The vast bulk of the California economy doesn't really do anything that people NEED. It's largely a service economy, serving the WHIMS of consumers.

Those parts of the economy that actually serve the needs of consumers — like food — have gotten so efficient that the majority of the state can ignore them. There are never gaps on the supermarket shelves, but sometimes other stores run short on a particular brand of sports shoe or some other item that's really irrelevant, and that becomes a crisis.

Except it really isn't. When the drought is certain to leave 800,000 acres of the most productive farmland in the world unplanted, that's a real crisis. When the nation's top food-producing counties in the San Joaquin Valley are facing double-digit unemployment, that's a real crisis. The bread-basket that is the Sacramento Valley isn't far behind on those unemployment figures.

The true crisis is that the majority of Californians don't notice the impacts of the drought, because they live in areas where assuring the essentials of life — like if there's enough food to eat — are so remote as to be easily ignored. A lot of people in L.A. might consider the drought a good thing for the food supply because it means the shopping carts left in the parking lots at Safeway are less likely to be wet from rain.

For most people in all the urban areas in this mixed-up state, the food chain starts at Safeway, or Ralph's, or some other store miles removed from the actual production of food. The shelves are filled; what's the problem?

And for those of us who actually understand — who fret for the almond growers when the frosts come in February, and fret for the rice growers trying to figure out how to make the production-wildlife habitat matrix work when the water isn't there — the UCLA report should be a wake-up call.

The rest of the state doesn't get it. We need to be ready for what that means. And we need to let them know how wrong they are.